09/01/2024
Great album !
ON THIS DATE (53 YEARS AGO)
August 30, 1971 - The Beach Boys: Surf's Up is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 4/5
# Allmusic 4/5
# Rolling Stone (see original review below)
Surf's Up is the seventeenth studio album by The Beach Boys, released on August 30, 1971. It reached #29 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart, and #15 on the UK Albums chart.
The album was released to more public anticipation than the Beach Boys had previously had for several years. The album's title is taken from the song of the same title written by Brian Wilson and Van D**e Parks for the abandoned studio album, Smile.
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LINER NOTES
The direction of The Beach Boys would take in the 1970’s was determined in no small part by audience reaction to the keen self-assurance of Sunflower, which Brian considered at the time to be “probably one of our best albums.” But Sunflower sold a piddling amount after its release on August 30, 1970, soaring no higher than 151 on Billboard’s Top LP chart during its scant four weeks on the survey. Since the commercial response to such an exceptional work was one of utter disinterest in the marketplace. The Beach Boys creative direction swerved downward, away from the hopefulness that had characterized the band’s new beginning at Warner Bros.
Surf’s Up, The Beach Boys subsequent 1971 release, was named for a song salvaged from Smile, and also featured a Sunflower outtake, Take A Load Off Your Feet (with the “Pete” tagline deleted). Brian initially opposed the use of Surf’s Up, in this context, but then relented, and he fought to overcome the group objections to the mournful ‘Til I Die.
Looking back with some thirty years of hindsight, Brian is philosophical about these once-heated issues. “Right, yeah,” he concedes of the controversy concerning utilization of Surf’s UP as the signature track, adding, “But I liked it eventually. The vocal on that was a little bit limited. It’s not my favorite vocal I ever did, but it did have heart. Nevertheless, it’ll be out there again with this reissue,” he says with a laugh, “and I’ll be naked to the world!”
“The lyrics for Surf’s Up were very Van D**e (Parks); only he could have done that – only Van D**e could have written those lyrics. We wrote that at my Chickering piano, I think, in my sandbox (i.e. eight truckloads of refined sand emptied into a low-walled, keyboard ensconced enclosure in the dining room of his Bellagio Road home) and it took us about an hour at most to write the whole thing. We wrote it pretty fast; it all happened like it should.”
But the rest of the latter day initiatives resulted in the album (originally dubbed Landlocked but retitled Surf’s Up after that song was appended to it) happened as a Beach Boys records shouldn’t: through stress, strife, brittle compromises and minimal overall involvement by Brian.
‘Til I Die and A Day In The Life Of A Tree are his two truly active bursts of participation in the bumpy project, the latter cowritten with KFPK deejay Jack Rieley, who became involved with the band after interviewing the then-reclusive Brian for his show on the Los Angeles-area Pacifica station then offering a six-page August 8, 1970 memo ruminating on how to stimulate “increased record sales and popularity for The Beach Boys.” Part of the advice focused on translating the group’s ecological and political concerns into a more contemporary image. Three years earlier, Carl Wilson had refused to step forward to be sworn in for the U.S. Army after receiving his draft notice; stating he was a conscientious objector, he was drawn into a four-year court battle before being permitted to perform community civic duties in lieu of military service because of his moral convictions. The Beach Boys’ revived status as a concert attraction, precipitated by a carefully promoted show at Carnegie Hall, (booked by Michael Klenfner, Chip Rachlin and George Brown’s Krab Productions), followed by a series of benefits and an appearance at a 1971 May Day anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., helped the cause as well.
Recalling the uneasy era and his contributions to an album that encapsulated it, Brian confesses, “I was thinking about the Surf’s Up songs, ‘Til I Die and A Day In The Life Of A Tree. ‘Til I Die is moving; I was feeling kind of small, and I wrote a song about how small I feel. (Recites) “I’m a cork on the ocean/Floating over a raging sea. I’m a rock on a landslide…/I’m a leaf on a windy day/Pretty soon I’ll be blown away.” It’s just a humble song. It had a nice smooth melody and I was really touched by it. A Day In The Life Of A Tree was a very spiritual number; it had some spiritual love to it. But Student Demonstration Time I didn’t like that, didn’t like the lyrical content. I thought it wasn’t Beach Boys enough.”
This open ambivalence toward so respected a Beach Boys album indicates the tension and turmoil surrounding the often-perplexing popular impasse the group faced during this period. Trying to fit in culturally while remaining in tune with its own collective Muse proved so difficult that the album is an unwonted ledger of The Beach Boys’ early ‘70s growing pains. Don’t Go Near The Water by Al Jardine and Mike Love gives voice to the forlorn attitude shared by the band members at the time, each of them fretting over what seemed like a poisoned well of what had once been mass appeal, even as the elemental existence they had always championed seem spoiled. The polluted ocean and atmosphere had become hostile environments, much as radio’s airwaves had become for The Boys. “Mike and Al did an unbelievable job on that – I loved it,” say Brian admiringly of the provocative track, which he appreciated primarily because it showed uncynical caring.
Long Promised Road, co-written by Carl Wilson and Jack Rieley is wistful but determined in its hopefulness and so Brian harbored fond feelings toward it. “It fits the description of “pioneer”-type song,” observes Brian. “Carl’s singing was gorgeous – he was my main man for vocals.” Thus, the heroic theme and his brother’s emotional investment in the saga certified the enduring worth.
Take A Load Off Your Feet, rescued from post-Sunflower oblivion albeit without its “Pete” tagline, is another slice of social commentary about rundown bodies as well as sullied beaches, its droll sound effects succeeding where a more heavy-handed scolding would not have done. The song echoed many of the sentiments behind Brian’s decision to briefly operate a West Hollywood health food shop called The Radiant Radish, where Brian says he first met Jack Rieley (the shop closed on July 29, 1970) but “Feet’s” lyrics kept its convictions lighthearted. “Al had a lot to do with that song,” Brian notes by way of praise for its inventiveness, “and I liked all the extra stuff. It was humorous.”
Disney Girls (1957), a mandolin-tinged dose of well-crooned nostalgia for “church bingo chances” and “old-time dances,” is pop perfection from Bruce Johnston’s skillful pen. “I thought it was marvelous the way he wrote the harmonies and chords,” says Brian. It evoked the sweeter Tootsie Roll-minded aspects of the second-term Eisenhower presidency, which saw the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and Althea Gibson’s capture of the Wimbledon women’s singles tennis title, but soon grew gloomy as racial violence erupted in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the first atomic blast was detonated in Nevada.
Student Demonstration Time, a Mike Love rewrite of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s Riot In Cell Block #9, passionately reexamined the Kent State tragedy and other recent violence against student peace and civil rights activists. It has a certain gritty grandeur that either galvanized listeners or grated on them. In Brian’s case it was the latter, “It was a little too intense,” he says. “It didn’t hit the spot for me. It wasn’t too vocally intense but lyrically it was a little too far-out for me.”
However, Feel Flows, a song his brother Carl wrote with Rieley, is a track Brian found sublime, its fluttering flute passages, ominous guitar riffs and ethereal keyboard effects captivating to the leader of the band. “Feel Flows was Carl’s tune, and I though it was wonderful – really great to have created,” Brian enthuses, believing its more impressionistic endorsement of peace was effective in a way a more dogmatic statement could never be. “Come to think of it,” he asserts, “Feel Flows is a great commentary on things.”
Lookin’ At Tomorrow (A Welfare Song), a poignant mini-soliloquy from a jobless rounder, seems like a coda to Long Promised Road, the pioneer busted in his starry-eyed ambitions but still “looking at tomorrow” for a fresh potential.
A Day In The Life Of A Tree by Brian and Rieley is well-meaning in its open melancholy but not match artistically for Brian’s masterful ‘Til I Die, whose buoyant harmonies and unfussy personal testimony pierced the soul with their vulnerability. The organ-based two-and-a-half minute opus was a magnificent use of all the group’s myriad vocal shadings, with intersecting descants leading a cathedral-like mood to the last quarter of its spell-weaving.
As for the concluding Surf’s Up, (assembled from 1966 studio sessions immortalized on a 1967 Leonard Bernstein TV special), it was a pastiche of old and new that shouldn’t have triumphed but did, largely because Brian’s original melodic vision was so strong. Surf’s Up was issued on August 30, 1971, just one calendar day shy of a year after the release of Sunflower. Thanks to an effective promotional set-up by Brother/Reprise, it rose to No. 29 on the Billboard Top LP’s chart and got respectable exposure on FM radio, Long Promised Road b/w ‘Til I Die, was disappointing, the ode to the pioneer dream reaching no further than No. 89 on Hot 100 in the autumn of ’71. A follow-up 45, Surf’s Up b/w Don’t Go Near The Water, which might have been a better choice for the first trial balloon, came too late in the process to derive any benefit from dwindling promotional winds and failed to chart.
Nonetheless, The Beach Boys and their Brother Records enterprise had managed an important artistic and critical beachhead after a long spell adrift. Indeed, during an April 27, 1971 concert bill at New York’s Fillmore East with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan turned up to catch the Boys’ set and then remarked aloud as a reporter stood within earshot, “You know, they’re fu***ng good, man.”
Brian Wilson himself attributes the staying power of Sunflower and Surf’s Up to the “spiritual love” of the music on both releases, an outlook complemented by the Brother Records logo – a Lakota chief on horseback with outstretched arms – that’s based on a 1909 bronze statue (at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts) by sculptor Cyrus Edward Dallin titled The Appeal To The Great Spirit. Himself a son of Western pioneer stock, Dallin intended the statue to depict Native Americans plight as white settlers populated the continent. Dallin saw the Lakota’s gesture as common to all humanity: “When material plans and helps fail, we reach out to the spiritual.”
~Timothy White
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ORIGINAL ROLLING STONE REVIEW
I've been waiting impatiently for this record since Sunflower and the small letdown I feel could be the other side of that impatience: the wish that they could have kept it a little longer to make it perfect. In this case that would not be a matter of production (why not expect technical perfection from a group that began producing itself in the early Sixties -- that handles the studio with such mastery?), but rather of waiting for the material to even out in quality. (Perhaps drummer Dennis Wilson's absence as songwriter -- and, because of a hand injury, on five of the ten cuts -- contributes to this flaw; Wilson wrote "Forever," on Sunflower, an incredibly beautiful piece.)
Still, I recall my own first reaction to Sunflower; some cuts at first seemed too thin, too light. ("Deirdre," for instance, which later became a favorite of mine precisely for the cream-puff-thrown-in-the-machinery effect, and for Brian Wilson's occasional showbiz-Broadway flair.)
But the important thing about the Beach Boys is just this aspect of their music. The production is usually flawless and the melodies so frequently exquisite that one tends to hear, then listen for -- and finally dismiss it as -- surface. Yet the surface is manipulated so carefully and so brilliantly that (and here I am forced by a certain poverty of analogy to shift senses) it becomes hologrammatic. Cotton candy: bite into it and the pink fluff becomes more sugar on your tongue -- then, p**f! -- mere aftertaste. Yet wait, there's more pink fluff inside the cone, and more, and more... (Not to mention the best aftertaste in the business.)
Wilson, Wilson, Wilson, Jardine, Love and Johnston form rock's only choir, and what one misses on Surf's Up are more of the incredible group vocals that have been equalled in power only by the Band. I'm thinking especially of "This Whole World," the most perfect example on the last album (aumdidit, aumdidit), but also of "Cottonfields" (so much more energy and emotion than Creedence's) on 20/20, and the slightly ragged but good-natured title-cut of Friends. And especially Wild Honey, the entire album.
Now there is an under-rated album, Wild Honey; it is surely the most even of their post-surfer LPs, and the last time they truly rocked their asses off, one cut after another. Capitol has scratched all their albums after '65, Pet Sounds and everything, including Wild Honey, that followed. But Wild Honey is a masterpiece. Sometimes the last thing I hear at night before falling asleep is from "Country Air," Carl holding that note ("Mother Nature, she fills my eyeyeyeyeyey") and rhyming it to the rooster's crow that begins the cut.
"Surf's Up" itself was to be the piece de resistance to Smile, that album that never was. Brian's collaboration with Van D**e Parks. The song itself emerges out of the legend that withholding it so long created. (It had been performed once by Brian on piano, in 1967 on a Leonard Bernstein-bestows-his-blessing-on-rock television show, never to be heard again.) Is it as good as was breathlessly rumored by those who had heard the partial track? Well, yes. Simple as that -- well, not that simple. The production is ornate -- elephant calls melting into French horns and clarinets, percussion via housekeys slapped against a top-hat, and you name it -- yet never opaque.
Here it is, however, just part of the puzzle. Like "Cabinessence" on 20/20, another Smile number, it is the last cut on side two, and even though this version was recorded completely in 1971, there is something of the effect of Brian saying: "Oh yeah, that's our new album, but hey, you wanna hear something we had left over around here?" In any case, there is cause to be grateful they got around to it:
Dove nested towers the hour was
Strike the street quicksilver moon
Carriage across the fog
Two-step to lamp lights cellar tune
The laughs come hard in Auld Lang Syne.
It would have more than given a run to anything on Sergeant Pepper, which was the current competition, though an album full of these rich pastries might have been perhaps oppressive. Maugham said that you could only really look at a painting for a certain number of minutes. My guess is that there was one central musical concept on Smile, one sound, one brand new chord theretofore undiscovered and accessible only to the Wilson-Parks songwriting ear; to listen to this lost album might have been exhausting -- or, better, another visual analogy; blinding. That is what "Surf's Up" is, dazzling almost to pearl-blindness, from the diamond necklace in the first line to the muted lyrics of third and fourth stanzas, pausing for an extended pun:
The glass was raised, the fire rose
The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting
While at port adieu or die.
Parks' lyrics make the most of the Beach Boys' obsession with the polished surface of their music: one is never unaware of the artistry in their construction, and you are tossed mercilessly from consent to technique, behind and before the scene, attention drawn to the song itself as an entity:
Canvass the town and brush the backdrop
Are you sleeping?
And:
Back through the opera-glass you see
The pit and the pendulum drawn
Culminated ruins domino...
Like their very best music, it is Light(ness) itself, fragile and transparent as sunshine.
Surf's Up, the album, is almost a concept album (remember them?) in its near obsession with the subject of water (if not the Beach Boys, then who?); the last cut of Sunflower was "Cool Water," five minutes worth, and the first track here is "Don't Go Near the Water," by Al Jardine and Mike Love. It begins without much promise, a rather trite melody that reminds the ear of commercial jingles, but the chorus is imaginative. Jardine wails the third verse with rather more soul than is called for with a lyric like:
Toothpaste and soap will make our oceans a bubble-bath
So let's avoid an ecological aftermath.
By the time we hear the original melody again, however, repeated with different words, it is rather lovable, and even the lyrics redeem themselves:
Don't go near the water
To do it any wrong
To be cool with the water
Is the message of this song.
"Long Promised Road," the next cut, is with "Feel Flows" on side two, Carl Wilson's first solo composing effort, with lyrics by Jack Reiley, the group's publicist. It is, as they say in more auspicious reviews, an auspicious debut. Carl produced and played every track on "Long Promised Road," but it has none of the static feeling or self-indulgence one might expect from such megalomania. His vocal is gentle and displays superb rhythmic control, begins light and travels into a rocker without seeming to shift gears; Reiley's lyrics are quite fine.
"Take A Load Off Your Feet," with a too-thin melody, obvious production and some good but wasted solo vocals by Jardine and Brian Wilson.
For me, the best realized song on the entire record, aside from "Surf's Up," is "Disney Girls (1957)." In an album that takes lyrics as seriously as this one (they are for the first time enclosed with the record), Bruce Johnston's contribution is, without reservation, brilliant, the lyrics as accomplished in their way as are Parks'; understandably we are more surprised by Johnston's achievement. Nobody's going to do the Fifties this well for quite a while:
Patti Page and summer days
On old Cape Cod...
Open cars and clearer stars
That's what I've lacked
But fantasy world and Disney girls
I'm comin' back.
Unrestrained sentiment, be forewarned (the Beach Boys have never hidden the emotion in their music), but not without a painless funny edge:
Love...Hi, Rick and Dave
Hi Pop...Well, good morning Mom
Love, get up, guess what
I'm in love with a girl I found
She's really swell
Because she likes
Church, bingo chances, and old time dances...
Its placement on the record, and the understated group backing, lulls you for the last song on this side, "Student Demonstration Time," new lyrics by Mike Love to the old Coasters' hit, "Riot on Cell Block No. 9." Sometimes I get the feeling that, because for so long there was a hipper-than-thou dismissal of the group, they are now trying too hard and maybe unnecessarily to prove their credentials. It's great that they're doing political rallies and benefits, but I suspect the real reason they're being taken seriously again is their live performances, it is impossible to hear them, as I did last fall at the Whisky, and not be knocked out. Anyway, this song has some spectacular horn-playing (they currently travel with a ten-man section), superb crackling lead guitar by Carl, and a police siren or simulated siren that really does make it as an instrument, but the lyrics, with one exception:
The violence spread down South
Where Jackson State brothers
Learned not to say nasty things
About Southern policemen's mothers
strikes me as embarrassing. Somehow more generalized protest (Gaye's "What's Goin' On?") works for me, where this specific catalogue seems to trivialize the events themselves. In any case, I'm told this is the show-stopper at their current round of concerts, so chacun a...
Carl's "Feel Flows" opens side two; an excellently produced number, the highlight is a break with Charles Lloyd's flute that is incredibly good. The transition from this is a tantalizingly brief piano riff and Carl's guitar, sucked back into the song in a weird imploding warp. The reverse or forward echo works beautifully with Reiley's lyrics.
"Looking at Tomorrow (A Welfare Song)" is folkish, hyped up with phase distortion. It grows on you, but the guitar work is overdelicate, if that is the word. It's minor.
"A Day in the Life of a Tree" is reminiscent of "Wind Chimes" on Smiley Smile, with Brian on pipe and pump organ and lyricist Reiley the solo vocalist. At first it comes off as too somber, but one's ear ripens for it. The real treat is the "lord oh now I lay me down" chorus. This is another "ecology" thing, and even if I could get over the banal political position -- banal since audience and artist may be assumed to agree -- a world like "pollution" is a clichéd catchword for a lot of other clichés. The line in question seems better, for instance, when it is sung in the background by Van D**e Parks, whose voice frequently gives lyrics a campy resonance:
Trees like me weren't meant to live
If all this world can give
Is pollution and slow death
Even so, it is hardly forgettable. Haunting, even.
Brian sings alone on "Till I Die," the last cut before "Surf's Up," but later the group joins in. "Till I Die" also has the disadvantage of meeting the ear first almost as a throwaway and then taking shape, listening after listening, inside the head. It is extremely moving.
This is a good album, probably as good as Sunflower, which is terrific, and which I've had six months more to listen to. It is certainly the most original in that it has contributed something purely its own. Perhaps because of the ecology theme, it is not as joyous. But it will do to keep the turntable warm until their next. (Myself, I hope it will be live, to show what they can do in concert.) They remain unique, and though they still promise more than they deliver, this group has delivered plenty throughout history. For that reason, they are perhaps still the most important -- and certainly the most "accomplished" -- of all American groups.
You can come home, guys, all is forgiven.
~ Arthur Schmidt (October 14, 1971)
TRACKS:
Side one
1 Don't Go Near the Water (Mike Love/Al Jardine) - 2:39
2 Long Promised Road (Carl Wilson/Jack Rieley) - 3:30
3 Take a Load Off Your Feet (Jardine/B. Wilson/Winfrey) - 2:29
4 Disney Girls (1957) (Bruce Johnston) - 4:07
5 Student Demonstration Time (Leiber/Stoller/Love) - 3:58
Side two
1 Feel Flows (C. Wilson/Rieley) - 4:44
2 Lookin' at Tomorrow (Jardine/Winfrey) - 1:55
3 A Day in the Life of a Tree (B. Wilson/Rieley) - 3:07
4 'Til I Die (B. Wilson) - 2:41
5 Surf's Up (B. Wilson/Van D**e Parks) - 4:12
